As the war wore on wearyingly to its end, the waves of wounded growing daily, Richard received a second, longer letter from Edith:
Dear Richard,
I hope you are well and that you will be home safely before too long. The house is very quiet without your parents, though Mrs Canty does her best to fill it with her relentless prattle. I am well, though I have been feeling quite nauseous. Mrs Canty’s boiling of cabbage does little to help that situation. I have not been up to Dublin in some time, so I have no news about anything there. I am under the care of Dr Bateman from Cork. The child will be born in January sometime, he thinks. I hope you will have returned by then. I know we have had our differences, Richard, but now that we are to be parents I think we should make the best of it for the sake of our child.
Fond regards,
Your wife,
Edith.
James felt great relief. Fond regards… Impending motherhood had clearly softened her. The war was in its final stages, he was sure of it, and he would return to Dunderrig, take over the practice and raise his family with Edith. Everything would be all right.
Chapter 4
Richard was finishing up in the surgery after a long and trying day. He’d spent the past hour with a woman from a farm a few miles outside of town. She was on her twelfth pregnancy and was in no physical condition to carry it to term. She barely had enough food to feed the other eleven, and she and her husband were good people. He had tried as delicately as possible to explain the concept of the ‘safe period’ and how she and her husband should abstain from relations at particular times of the month but he feared his lesson fell on deaf ears. Even if she could understand what he told her, which he very much doubted, she – like so many others – was deeply entrenched in Catholicism, which was vehemently opposed to any intervention in the propagation of the faithful. Richard wondered why God had made so many mouths, yet often not enough food to put into them.
Ireland’s War of Independence against the British, which had begun as soon as he’d arrived back in Ireland, had already cost the lives of so many sons, fathers and husbands that much of the land had been left untended. British reprisals against any Irish rebel activity were swift, arbitrary and brutal, and so many poor women were left to fend for themselves with all these hungry mouths to feed.
When Richard had returned to Ireland in January of 1919, he’d already had more than his fill of war. He had spent so many nights in France listening to the incessant shellfire and trying to transport himself home, to the peace and tranquillity of West Cork. How naïve he had been, to imagine such savagery could never happen on his own doorstep.
Now he refused engaging in the politics of this new war, thus enraging many of his neighbours, who questioned his loyalty to his country. He tried to explain how he had already seen too much waste of life, and too many horrific wounds – both to men’s bodies and to their souls – and that in his opinion, no matter what the cause, war was never worth it. His sermons against violence were lost on West Cork revolutionaries. Nonetheless, he was determined to treat all patients ethically and honestly, regardless of political affiliation. If called on to treat a bullet wound, or some other trauma sustained in fighting, he asked no questions. When the patient or those around him tried to explain or glorify an injury, he only answered that it was better if they told him nothing. That way, if questioned by the British, he would have nothing to tell.
On one particular occasion he was called to a house near Glandore to treat a young man who’d been shot in the thigh and was losing a lot of blood; the boy lay half-conscious, raving about ‘English bastards’. Richard spoke soothingly to him while attempting to remove the bullet and staunch the bleeding. In a moment of clarity, the boy looked up and recognised him.
‘Are you that traitor who fought for the British?’
‘I know it is difficult but try to hold still… I never fought for or against anyone in my life. I wore a uniform but not so I could kill anyone. I am a doctor, and I spent the war in France treating lads like you.’
The boy screamed and writhed. ‘Get away from me, you Sassenach fucker! Get your filthy fuckin’ hands off me! Mam, send him away!’
‘Ssh, Patrick… Don’t mind him, Doctor Buckley,’ the boy’s mother pleaded. ‘He don’t know what he’s saying, honest to God he don’t.’
Richard sighed. ‘Listen to me, Patrick. You can call me whatever you wish. My only interest right now is in saving your life. Now, you have to keep still. However much this hurts. If I don’t remove the bullet you will bleed to death within the hour.’
‘Lie still, Patrick, lie still for the good doctor…’ His mother was weeping now. ‘You’ll die if you don’t let him help you.’
The boy turned his face to the wall, but he lay still. Richard removed the bullet and stopped the bleeding.
As he was leaving the house, a man arrived whom Richard recognised from his school days – and as well, from that long-ago trip to the slaughterhouse in Skibbereen, the smell of which had followed him to France.
‘Richard,’ the man nodded in greeting. ‘Will the lad make it?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say at this stage. He’s lost a lot of blood, and needs a transfusion. If you can get him to the hospital...’
‘Hospital isn’t an option.’ Seamus Corrigan, now a captain in the IRA, was adamant.
Richard didn’t argue. ‘Try to keep the wound clean to stop any infection and give him plenty of water. The next twenty four hours will be critical.’ And he walked away across the yard of the farmhouse to his car. Opening the door of the Morris Oxford, he realised Seamus had followed him.
‘Richard, we appreciate you coming out like this, taking care of our boys. This war is hard on the lads, not to mind their families, and those British bastards are so fuckin’...’
Richard turned to face him, running a hand through his sandy hair. He was too exhausted and demoralised to endure this conversation. ‘Seamus, it’s been a very long night. My twins are cutting their back teeth. No-one in our house is getting too much sleep. I sincerely hope the lad makes it, but I’ve done the best I can. In hospital, he would be certain to survive. But if you won’t take him, then he is as likely to die as to live.’
Corrigan shook Richard’s hand. ‘Thanks for everything.’
Richard nodded and drove away.
Colonel Maxwell, commanding officer of the British Army stationed in Skibbereen, had appeared at his house a week after that incident, demanding to know the name of any man he had recently treated for bullet wounds. Richard explained that he couldn’t break patient confidentiality, and reminded the colonel that the British soldiers came to him as well, for all their ailments. Many, like he himself, suffered night terrors after their experiences in France; they trusted him to listen to them. He’d removed bullets from their bodies too, patching them up as best he could and sending them on their way. He only desired to be left to his work, unhampered by any allegiance to either side.
‘That is a luxury I cannot afford you, I’m afraid, ‘ Maxwell replied in his clipped public school accent. ‘You were on our side over there, Doctor. Surely you can see what we’re dealing with here. I simply will not have you giving these terrorists carte blanche. There must be accountability. From now on, I will require a weekly log of all patients you see, either in or outside of your surgery.’
‘I can’t do that I’m afraid,’ Richard replied calmly.
‘Look here, Doctor, you perform a very valuable service. Do not force me to do anything that would jeopardise your practice or your livelihood.’
Richard didn’t react to the thinly veiled threat but sat in his chair impassively.
Taking his silence as acquiescence, the colonel nodded, satisfied. ‘Jolly good. I’ll be in touch in the coming days.’
Two evenings later, Richard sat alone in the kitchen reading the newspaper and enjoying a moment of peace. The twins, now mischievous toddlers, were tucked up in bed, and the rest of the household had retired. To
his annoyance, the restful silence was suddenly shattered by loud knocking on the front door. He sighed, setting aside the paper: he hated leaving his family unprotected when he was called out to a patient in the night. The days when he could be sure they would be safe were over because of the tension that now existed between the IRA and the British. When he opened the door, a young private was standing on the top step; a British army car stood with its engine ticking over in the driveway behind him.
‘Yes?’
‘Dr Buckley, sir, Colonel Maxwell sent me to fetch you, sir, it’s ‘is boy, sir, there’s somfing up wiv ‘im. He says you’re to ‘urry like. Sir.’ The cockney accent reminded Richard of a patient of his, in Amiens. The poor lad had died – his injuries too catastrophic to survive.
Putting his hat and overcoat on while scribbling a quick note for Solange to find if she woke, Richard seized his doctor’s bag from his surgery and jumped into the waiting military vehicle.
On his arrival, he was greeted by a staff officer who was standing in the open doorway of the large grey barracks in the middle of the town of Skibbereen. Richard had been inside this cold and functional building once before, with his father, and knew there were living quarters on the upper floor. He knew also that for many years the local policeman had preferred to inhabit the smaller, more comfortable house next door to the barracks. It seemed that the Maxwell family – the Colonel, his wife, and their three sons – had moved back into the main building in recent times, clearly fearing for their safety.
As Richard was led up the stairs, he asked the staff officer, ‘What age is the boy?’
‘I’m not sure exactly, sir. Ten or eleven?’
‘His name?’
‘Arthur.’
‘And his symptoms?’
Before the officer could reply, a woman emerged from a room on the second floor of the house. She was dishevelled and clearly frantic with worry.
‘Oh thank goodness, please, you have to help him, he can’t breathe, my poor Artie...’ Her accent was English but soft and rural – perhaps from Devon or Cornwall.
Richard ran past her into the room. Lying on a bed, struggling almost soundlessly for air, was a thin dark-haired boy whose lips were turning blue. His father, wearing only trousers and a vest, knelt by the bed holding his son’s hand, his face a mask of fear. It was hard to equate this man with the authoritarian figure who had been issuing commands in Richard’s surgery just two days earlier.
Richard bent over the bed. ‘Hello Artie, I’m Doctor Buckley. I’m just going to have a little look in your throat.’
The boy was unable to answer, but his eyes were wild with panic as his body bucked and strained with the effort to breathe.
Richard soothed him: “You are a big, brave lad. Now, I need you to help me help you. Open your mouth a little wider…’
The boy’s eyes fixed on Richard’s; he opened his mouth as wide as he could.
Gently, Richard examined him. ‘Now Artie, I see what the problem is and we’ll have you right as rain in just a few minutes. I need to talk to your Mammy and Daddy for a moment, and then I’ll be back to make you better.’
Pausing only to instruct the officer by the door to fetch him a basin of boiling water, Richard ushered the boy’s parents into a corner of the room. He spoke very calmly and methodically to them, while selecting the necessary instruments from his bag. ‘Your son has epiglotitis. The flap of tissue that sits at the base of the tongue has become infected and inflamed and is obstructing his windpipe. I have no option at this stage but to attempt an emergency airway puncture. I will need to make an incision in your son’s throat, through the skin and cricothyroid membrane, to enable him to breath.’
Artie’s mother gave a stricken cry, and the colonel straightened his shoulders, attempting to assert his authority. ‘Have you done this before? How can we be sure you know what you are doing? You’re a country doctor. There’s an ambulance on its way from Bandon. We need to bring our son to the hospital. If you are right, and he needs this procedure, it should be done by a proper surgeon.’
‘Colonel Maxwell…’ He lowered his voice further. ‘I realise how worried you must be. I’m a father myself. But if I do not attempt this procedure now, your son will certainly die. It is dangerous, and, yes, I have performed a cricothyrotomy before – twice.’
‘And…?’
‘In one instance, the patient lived. In the second, he did not, because it was too late.’
The couple stared at each other and at their choking son, whose thin little body was in spasm now with the increasingly impossible effort to breathe.
‘Do it,’ said the Colonel grimly.
His wife hurried to comfort her boy. ‘The doctor is going to make you better now, Artie. Don’t you worry about anything. Daddy and I are here, so don’t worry, darling, whatever happens. Everything is going to be fine.’
The officer returned with a basin of boiling water and placed it on the table beside the bed; Richard laid out his instruments beside it. ‘Go to the other side and hold his hand,’ he instructed the boy’s mother. He leant over the trembling boy. ‘Now Artie, I want you to think about Christmas and what Santa Claus is going to bring you. I think you might get something very special this year for being such a big brave boy.’ He placed a rolled-up towel under the child’s shoulders, stretching out his neck. Feeling for the hard edge of the thyroid cartilage, he closed his eyes, trusting his fingers. Once he had located the site just below the cartilage, he sterilised his scalpel in the boiling water. Making the incision quickly, he inserted an endotracheal tube into the boy’s throat. Instant relief registered on the boy’s face; he inhaled noisily, his chest expanded, and the colour flooded back to his lips. Richard secured the tube and turned to Colonel Maxwell.
‘He is out of immediate danger but we must get him to hospital.’
Mrs Maxwell was weeping with relief, and Colonel Maxwell was hoarse as he replied, ‘The ambulance should be here any moment. It will bring him to Victoria Military Hospital in Cork. Will he… Will he stay well enough for the journey?’
Richard checked his patient’s pulse and breathing. Both had stabilised. ‘He has an excellent chance.’ Gently, he shook the boy’s hand. ‘You’re a great lad, Artie. You’re going to be grand. I’ll see you kicking a football with your brothers in a few weeks, all right?’
Artie’s mother was whispering into her son’s ear, reassuring him that all was well. Moments later two military medics hurried into the room and under Richard’s instructions gently loaded Artie onto a stretcher. The colonel’s wife insisted on being the one to travel with her youngest, leaving her husband to ensure the safety of her older sons – both still sleeping – from any attack made on the barracks by Irish rebels. She paused before leaving to take Richard’s hand. ‘Thank you, Doctor Buckley. He’s our baby, and... There are no words to convey the fullness of my heart, except to say that we are forever in your debt.’
‘You are welcome.’ He packed up his instruments and made his way to a bathroom to wash himself. When he emerged he was directed by the staff officer to a large room that had been turned into a sitting room of sorts. Despite its imposing size and drab walls and floor, the Maxwell family had endeavoured to make it home. A fire burned merrily in the grate and on either side of the fireplace were large, comfortable-looking sofas. The tables and shelves around the room held books and toys and stacked in one corner were cricket bats, fishing rods and footballs. Colonel Maxwell stood with a glass in his hand, his back to the fire.
‘Drink?’ he offered.
‘Yes, I think I will.’ Richard accepted a large whiskey, and stood taking in the room.
Maxwell followed his eyes. ‘It’s not much, I know. The house was better, but just not safe. Dorothy and the boys are better here. I would like to send them back, away from here altogether. But she won’t be bossed about, my lady wife. Says if I’m here then that’s where she’s staying... Though after this, I don’t know.’
Richard s
aid nothing, sipping his drink.
Maxwell poured himself another glass. ‘And how are your two children? Twins, I heard? Boys or girls?’
‘They’re fine. Ruling the roost. A boy and a girl, James and Juliet. They’re two and a half now and full of mischief. Sure you know yourself with your own lads.’ Richard’s tone was light. There was no indication that the men had been at loggerheads just days earlier.
‘The time goes so quickly. It seems like only yesterday our boys were babes in arms and now they’re growing up. The eldest will be off to Eton soon.’ He paused staring into the flames. ‘Look about that other thing. I need to present a report to my superiors. The local population, you know, providing aid the rebels... It can’t be tolerated. Even if you are a doctor. But I won’t be enquiring too deeply, if you understand me. It’s the best I can do.’
Richard smiled, drained his whiskey and handed the glass to the Colonel. Putting on his coat and hat he said, ‘Good night. Let me know how Artie fares.’
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The Tour Page 31